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All of that is in there, and as the sysadmin, seeing who moderated what is very, very easy.

The problem is, unless you give everyone the ability to moderate all the time, not everyone will HAVE mod points - and as a result, only some students will get the ability to moderate, which is highly unfair if grades depend on these marks.

Conversely, giving everyone the ability to moderate cheapens the value of a mod point, and in some cases, still won't solve the problem - once a comment is as highly rated as poss

The nice thing about slash moderation is that random people are selected to moderate a given comment.

This means that one can trust the moderation to some extent and even give students marks based on how well their comments have been received by their peers.

However, it is of course a problem that some students may not have mod points. And losing the ability to post is a serious problem.

We have actually had major problems getting slash running at all (so I can't comment/play with your proposed solutions yet). I don't have root access at uni and this makes installation of all the prerequisite packages much harder.

Also, does slash require a dedicated web server? I recall from the docs that you need a special apache setup.

In any case, we have been experimenting with PostNuke as well. I don't think it's moderation is advanced as Slash's, so if we use it, we probably can't take the results of the moderation seriously for marking.

Amir

P.S. We have recently set up a PostNuke site for the discussion of innovative computer science ideas. See:

However, it is of course a problem that some students may not have mod points.

You could always change the default for the number of points a person starts off with, when they create their account.

And losing the ability to post is a serious problem.

Like I said in another post, I don't know if a person loses the ability to post when their mod points get too low. That could be the case. I've never seen this behavior in action. But, I would think, it would be easy to turn this behavior off, or modify it

It is not looking good. SS here won't give me root access and they will not put in the time to install Slash. I tried installing it without root access once but gave up since it was much more difficult to install the prerequisites.

Moreover, I don't have a spare machine available that I can maintain myself.

Since I am planning to make these discussions open to all and comp3141 might be of interest to open source developers, perhaps it might be possible to host them on an existing slash site?

That, or if you are still interested, we could host a site like this for you for very little money. I'm always willing to work with not for profit, and educational institutions. Hell, I'm a CS student myself (at Joliet Junior College), so I could give you guys a great deal.

BTW, I am thinking of making these lecture preparation discussions completely open for anyone to participate -- not only comp3141 students.

The whole point after all is to stimulate discussion and help comp3141 students prepare for lecture. Whether or not some of this discussion is done by non-comp3141 students is beside the point. The goal is to present the best discussion possible on an upcoming lecture.

I'm not sure whether this would have any implications with respect to the moderation. It may be ok

I would suggest you setup the site so that all authors have the ability to mod every post. Give all students a security level of 1, and the author flag, thus they can moderate everything, and you'll be able to see on each post who moderated it.

Non-students can moderate too, but I wouldn't give them auto mod since they don't need it.